Samsung Galaxy S 4 (T-Mobile)

A blinding number of features. Incredibly fast. Ships with Android 4.2.2. Relatively small for its display size. Spectacular call quality.

Cons
Plastic body. Low-light photo performance could be better.

Bottom Line

Even better than its excellent predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 is the ultimate kitchen-sink Android phone for 2013, with something for everyone.

By Sascha SeganS EverythingLet's get all of this out of the way first. The Galaxy S 4 is far from a stock Android phone. It's practically encrusted with Samsung-exclusive features. If you're a purist, you'll run screaming over to the LG Nexus 4. But there's still a lot here to love and a lot to play with, even if some of the stuff doesn't quite work.

Already exhausted? The S 4 comes with an Easy Mode, which is a brilliant idea, although maybe not necessarily here. Easy Mode gives you a very simplified home screen: clock, weather, date, six standard app icons, and a second screen with nine large, customized icons. The calendar shows large type, too. Will the target audience for Easy Mode be buying a smartphone of this caliber? I'm not sure, but I guess it's a good thing to have available.

Head back to Normal mode and start on the lock screen. The default Home screen reads "Life Companion" in a ridiculous quasi-script, and when you touch it, there's a lens flare and a little sound like someone playing the rim of a glass full of water. You can customize all that, of course, and you can tweak your Android home screens with a huge number of widgets, and determine what shows up on the quick-settings bar when you drag down the notifications pane.

Oh, the settings! Samsung may not encourage you to install your own ROM, but the Settings screens are a tweaker's wonderland. You can change when the notifications LED lights up, what notifications you get and when, what widgets go on the home screen, whether or not the touch screen should work with gloves, which apps can load in multiple windows…there's a lot.

Multiple window mode has arrived from the Samsung Galaxy Note II, and it's convenient, letting you split the screen in half and look at two Web pages, maps, email, or a few other apps. Samsung's S Voice still provides comprehensive voice commands; it's not as natural-language as Siri, but it's far superior to the very basic voice commands on the HTC One. S Translator deciphers foreign languages, whether by itself, in text messages, or in Samsung's email app (though not in Gmail). Polaris Office reads Microsoft Office documents and PDFs. S Note takes notes, although it's not as fun as it is with the S Pen on the Galaxy Note.

Past greatest hits like Smart Stay (which prevents the screen from turning off when you're looking at it) and customized audio call quality have been joined by a bunch of other useful, preloaded apps. I'm most excited about S Health, which combines a working pedometer, thermometer, humidity meter, and calorie counter. Though it's not available yet, S Health will later hook up with a body-monitoring armband for more exciting self health assessment. Otherwise, Optical Reader is a business card and QR code scanner, while Story Album tries to make photo albums out of photos taken in the same place.

WatchOn falls in the middle group of usable inventions. It's another iteration of the Peel Remote, the TV program guide software we've seen on several Samsung tablets and the HTC One. Peel does a good job of showing what's on TV right now, but I don't know many smartphone owners who watch what's on right now, and the app's Achilles' heel is that it can't see or access DVRs. You can also rent or buy TV and movies from Samsung's store or Netflix, and watch them on your HDTV using an MHL cable, a Samsung Smart TV, or Samsung's AllShare Cast Wireless Hub ($99.99).

WatchOn could save itself with its basic IR remote support, but even that has some issues. Like the HTC One, the S 4 has an infrared emitter, and it'll control a broad array of TVs, DVRs, and other gadgets. Controlling my TiVo, though, I found it entered channel numbers frustratingly slowly.

Now we get to the ugly; some ideas which should probably have been left on the drawing table. The new Samsung Hub store is a damp squib, a misfire that serves the company (by getting people to buy DRMed media which only works on Samsung devices), but doesn't serve consumers. It has a solid selection of music, a rather strange collection of movies, and a hideously weak choice of books. Samsung should leave the media business up to Blockbuster, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, all of whose apps run just fine on the Galaxy S 4.

Also, Samsung's Air View and Smart Scroll aren't quite ready for prime time. Air View lets you preview certain types of content by hovering a finger over them, but it's just a little physically awkward to hold your finger like that, and the information you get is rarely very helpful. Smart Scroll is supposed to let you scroll Web pages by tilting your head (it's a camera-based trick) but I found it spastic and unreliable.

There's more. Oh yes, there's more. Just like with the Galaxy S3, this is a phone where you can discover new things a year after you have it.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts...

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